an AU idea I've had bouncing around for a while, happy Eobirthday! <3333
Warnings: literal stealing of hearts
The average adult human heart weighs around 9 ounces.
Less than a pound of muscle, insignificant in mass, the size of a small fist. Frustratingly vital.
The Negative Speed Force was not perfect. It was not the Speed Force. It was an engine, a parasite, a hollowed-out thing feeding on his hatred. It did not embrace him, it did not care to. It devoured, relentlessly.
It consumed him.
Eobard Thawne was decaying.
Not in the poetic sense. Not in the wistful way one might describe the gradual softening of mortality, not in the natural way all things came to an end. No, this was something worse. Something cruel. His body rejected its own existence, an anomaly unmoored from time, an echo that should have long faded but refused to die - his heart, no longer adequate, no longer sufficient, unable to withstand the speeds at which he was now accustomed to. It failed him in agonizing increments - erratic beats, a constant ache spreading through his ribs, the unmistakable warning of something breaking down inside him.
The first time had been unplanned. A desperate, necessary experiment.
Harrison Wells had been dying already.
Eobard remembered it vividly - the dim, flickering headlights, the scent of gasoline curling in the cold night air, the slow, ragged gasps of a dying man trying to drag himself from the wreckage. He had been watching, standing over him, the ruined remains of the car groaning as it settled into stillness.
Phasing took practice. Precision. Too little control and he risked disruption - vessels torn too violently, cardiac tissue rendered useless. He had to be delicate. Eobard's hand blurred as he reached forward, his molecules vibrating at impossible speeds, slipping through skin, through muscle, through Harrison Wells' ribcage. His fingers wrapped around Wells' heart, still fighting, still alive, and he pulled.
The electric charge of Wells' life force surged up his arm, dancing through his veins like the Negative Speed Force itself, reviving him. His own heart restarted with a painful, shuddering force. He exhaled.
Wells' heart withered instantly, collapsing, blackening, shriveling like paper held to an open flame. With barely a movement, Eobard crumbled it into dry, useless dust between his fingers.
The heart lasted longer than his own but not long enough.
Eobard did not waste. He did not take without reason. He did not kill for pleasure - only necessity. A jogger on an early morning run. A businessman returning home. A doctor alone on the late shift. He targeted each precisely to ensure the hearts would last. Each seemed only to fail faster.
Barry Allen had stripped him of his future, of his place in history, had left him rotting in a century that was never meant to hold him, in a body that refused to sustain him. But he would find a way to survive.
